5 Things Entrepreneurs Can Learn from MLK

Entrepreneurship is no easy road. In fact, many business owners will tell you: “The more advice, the better.”

Compiled by Forbes, here are a few business lessons to be learned from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work with the Civil Rights Movement:

1. Make Your Dream a RealityThe phrase people most often associate with Dr. King – excerpted from his landmark 1963 speech — is “I have a dream.” Of course, many people have dreams. Some even have great dreams. But most people don’t work to make their dreams a reality as did Dr. King. Great ideas for new products, businesses, and works of science and art die every day with their inventors. To be an entrepreneur is to dream – but is even more to do.

2. The Way It Was Is Not The Way It Has to BeAt the time that Dr. King gave his famous speech at the Mall in Washington, racism had been entrenched in American culture for centuries. Dr. King challenged the status quo, and raised awareness of a different and better future that could be built from positive change. Likewise, businesses often are averse to changing long-held positions, or denying that major changes for the better can take place, with or without them. Only a few years ago, “experts” were saying that people would reject keyboard-less smart phones like the iPhone, and Blackberry would continue to dominate the smart phone market for many years to come. We know how that turned out.

3. Change Can Happen FastThe vast majority of the members of my generation – born not that many years after it took a struggle to get the Civil Rights Act passed – consider the notion that people should be segregated based on the color of their skin to be both morally repugnant and downright ridiculous. Attitudes change quickly – especially after positive developments occur and everyone sees the correctness of the change. This is true vis-à-vis business as well. Consider how quickly Blackberry went from market leader to having less than 4% of market share, or how fast Kodak was transformed from having its film products bought by nearly every family in America to filing for bankruptcy as a firm many teenagers “had never heard of.”